Artist

Alfredo

Jaar

turns

his

critical

eye

toward

Japan’s

relationship

to

‘America’

Alfredo Jaar is angry with America — that is, the country monopolizing that name.

In “You and Me and the Others,” a new exhibition at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, the New York-based Chilean artist and architect takes the United States to task. The works in the show are fiercely critical of U.S. hegemony (“America is a continent, not a country,” Jaar is wont to say) as well as countries that he says enable it — like Japan.

“I have always been shocked by the weakness and dependence of Japan towards the United States,” the artist says at a press preview, arguing that Japan has no strong identity when it comes to the superpower. “Only recently have I heard some Japanese politicians talking about this publicly...asking for independence from the U.S.,” he says.

To that end, Jaar’s newly commissioned work, “Tomorrow is another day,” shows two light boxes facing each other: A box with a transparent U.S. flag hangs from the ceiling facing down, looming over the lower box, which contains the Japanese flag. The white of the Japanese flag reflects back a dimmed American one. The position of the boxes suggests control and dominance, which echoes a misogynistic rhetoric heard among nationalists that the U.S.’s defeat of Japan in World War II was an act of sexual violence that robbed the country of its masculinity.